Body-text fonts, pt. 42: Monotype Garamond (or something close)

At the ripe old age of about sixty, Evelyn Waugh published A Little Learning, the first volume of his autobiography. It was his last book. Two years later, he died.

A Little Learning begins like this:

How’s that for eloquent weariness?

(There are Garamonds and Garamonds. I don’t know all of their histories. This is Monotype’s metal-type version or something close enough; the digitization is what everyone recognizes from Microsoft Word.)

Waugh’d be a challenge for me to read chronologically because I’ve gone through his early novels many times and his late works hardly at all. I’d have to make it past Brideshead and The Loved One to get to the really unfamiliar stuff. In the mid-1940s, Waugh began tackling a steeper grade than I’ve been able to climb at the breakneck pace he set in his comical works.

It’s better, perhaps, to try going backwards, to begin with sluggish, morbid despair and retrace the author’s path from initial breakneck hilarity (in its way, just as despairing).

Despair usually is a sin, but in Waugh’s case it may actually be a virtue.

Shopping

My Google Chromebook – cracked and dented after two years of harsh treatment (Samuel would use it as a stepping-stool, Daniel as an anvil/discus) – gave up its ghost yesterday, so I am blogging with my phone.

We trekked to Best Buy last night. The children gaped at the huge TVs. The computer salesman, who was urging an older couple to buy a higher-end device, may or may not have noticed us hovering (we were in his section some thirty minutes).

I cornered a worker from a different department. Sorry, he’s the only computer guy, he told me.

Amazing, I remarked to Karin as we left the store.

It’s been that way since COVID, she said.

Oh, dear.

I bought a refurbished machine through Amazon. It should arrive on Friday. Suppliers of refurbished Chromebooks receive very low ratings. The company I bought from has an approval rating of 88% – extremely high.

I don’t know how troubling this ought to be. A lot of “one star” raters complain, misguidedly, that they can’t install a Windows OS. How do you take off the Google, they ask.

One fellow quoted fire-and-brimstone verses, concluding: Vengeance is mine, saith the LORD.

Drafting today’s entry longhand before I tap it out may benefit the prose. Or not. Samuel is fascinated; never has he seen such long blocks of handwriting. He stares at the paper, draping himself over me, pinning down my limbs.

Daniel, who has removed his pants and diaper, races through the house.